Over the last ten years, my wife and I have visited many churches in our area of suburban Kansas City, and in each of the churches, with only one exception, we have clearly seen the dearth of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
I grew up attending a Presbyterian church in St. Louis County, Missouri. At least in that church, the Holy Spirit was often mentioned in the printed program we were handed as we entered for Sunday service. However, in that church the Holy Spirit was known as the “Holy Ghost”. At least they were honest enough to publicly recognize Him as a part of the triune Godhead, even if He was a “ghost”. The churches we’ve attended for several years now have ‘ghosted’ the Holy Spirit right out of His office!
The last three churches we briefly joined in our part of the county have all gone into the Next Step Program, i.e., helping attendees to figure out how to serve in their churches. This program is proposed as a way to serve the community, and neighborhoods where we live, but it all begins with serving the church in some capacity and calling it ‘getting plugged in’. Once ‘plugged in’ we are encouraged to take the Gospel into our community. That sounds good and logical, but it is bypassing the Scriptural admonition to do the same.
According to Scripture in the book of Acts, the power behind community evangelism is clearly given:
[Acts 1:4-8 NASB95] 4 Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” [He said,] “you heard of from Me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” 6 So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; 8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”
Why is this clear Scriptural admonition so routinely ignored by our current crop of pulpit-fillers? Why? Is it difficult to grasp? Is the concept of two different baptisms something we should gloss over and ignore, or was it critical enough for Jesus to ‘command’ his disciples to ‘wait’ for their Holy Spirit infilling before they began their ministries? And yet, almost all of the American churches I am aware of, think nothing of harassing their members to obey Jesus’ commands while at the same time ignoring the infilling power of the Holy Spirit He commanded them to first receive! How is this logical? How is this ‘obedience’ to Jesus’ commands?
I like the church we’ve been attending for the last six plus months, and I like the people we’ve met; frankly, they are the only reason we still attend that church, but they are being short-changed, and in effect told to drive the Christian outreach car without using spark plugs.
I’m betting most, if not all the other members attending this and other same-programmed churches, are starving for the true, spiritual food they were created to feast on, while not even identifying their own starvation. Instead of being holy conduits for God’s power, they are continuously and routinely immersed in Christian busyness. David Wilkerson used to say, “If the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.”
The Holy Spirit is not a holy ghost, and if I were Him, I’d be offended at the backseat. He is the very Person and the Power of God Almighty and should be treated as such. The Bible we say we revere is only a book, filled with white paper pages and black ink…until and if the Holy Spirit breathes the Life of Jesus into the text.
Without recognizing the extreme, absolute necessity of living our Christian lives according to the in-our-face holy commands of God, we are only destined to be members of religious clubs, some of which are pushing the members to “be busy”, within or outside of the church buildings.
Only the Holy Spirit can bring the life of God to our Christian faith, and only He can sustain it. Without the power of the Holy Spirit being active in and through us, we are wasting the time we’ve been gifted by being alive.
Prove me wrong.
John Miltenberger
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Read More About: Christianity | Revival
